


The Coruscant Guard is Compromised

by MercySewerPyro



Series: A Thousand Painted Teeth [14]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Disassociation, Force-Sensitive Clones (Star Wars), Gen, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Link, Order 66 allusions, This one is kind of bleak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:40:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25053286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercySewerPyro/pseuds/MercySewerPyro
Summary: It ripples through the link again and again, a hurricane siren, a klaxon, both warning and desperate plea. Fox hopes it will be enough.The Coruscant Guard is compromised.(Written for Fox Week on tumblr)
Series: A Thousand Painted Teeth [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1728298
Comments: 34
Kudos: 166





	The Coruscant Guard is Compromised

_ The Coruscant Guard is compromised. _

A pulse sent out, over and over, a warning siren thrumming through the link. A corps-strong or more of minds, all with the same desperate, urgent call.

The Coruscant Guard is compromised. And it is likely they have been compromised since the beginning.

And one Commander Fox presses his forehead to the cold glass of his office, watching the setting sun, the darkness falling, and wonders how it all came to this.

It never had been a good job. It was neither interesting nor glamorous, this military presence on the city-planet. It was an assignment that was in reality less of a last defence and more of a glorified police force, their presence so often used as a weapon by those on both sides of the conflict. And barely even that; here, they were little better than servants on the leashes of ungrateful Senators, many barely even seeing them as people. After all: on Coruscant, you don’t get charged with murder upon the death of a clone. You get charged with destruction of property. Here, so close to the Jedi Temple and yet so far from their grace, the _vode_ are on their own.

With all that, it was no wonder the Guard were always the most cynical bastards in the entire Grand Army. Here, it was no wonder they spat at the thought of the Jedi; those assigned to the Temple were treated better, but what of their siblings? There was no Force-led salvation, not on soulless Coruscant.

But Fox, and Thorn and Stone at his sides, knew it was a necessary sacrifice. To leave the capital unprotected would be the doom of them all, brother, Jedi, and civilian. And so they endured the abuse.

And somehow, they missed all the signs- Until it was too late.

_ The Coruscant Guard is compromised. _

The truth is, they don’t even know how. The entire situation had spiralled out of Fox’s control long before even there were whispers of something wrong; assassinations, the framing of neutral Senators for crimes they never committed, the quiet disappearance of those who would call for peace. With every fraying thread grasped, a hundred more would slip through their fingers. So many of the _vode_ were here, their so-called last bastion, and yet they were frustratingly helpless. Their failings became a weapon against them, a thing hurled at them by the citizens they were supposed to be protecting, their dissatisfaction with the war (with the _clones,_ these things that weren’t even _people_ in the natborns’ eyes) haunting the Guard’s every move.

They’d had enough problems to deal with, the pressure nearly drowning, that they didn’t even know when it started. When the world blurred, and troopers were not themselves- Losing time, without losing it at all.

Working in the Guard, a day passed in a blur was not even that much of an anomaly. The job was either terrible, horrible drudgery, or it was panic and tension- Never anything else. They were caught between the hostage crises and the endless paperwork, and they suffered for it. What was another few minutes, another few hours, another day or more? The Guard were masters of retaining only the details that were necessary; the rest would be discarded, in favour of falling face-first into a pillow at night and hoping tomorrow would be better.

(It was never better.)

But the truth was this, revealed to them in time: darkness had fallen on Coruscant, and it had dragged the Guard down with it.

_ The Coruscant Guard is compromised. _

Perhaps it had always been dark, and they had just been blind. Maybe the whole galaxy was blind; their luckiest and all the Jedi in the Temple, and no one had noticed the Guard was drowning until brother had tried to talk to brother, Thorn brushing out to Fox, and found nothing but Dark.

The Dark, and the screaming mantra drowning out all hints of the person beneath: _Good Soldiers Follow Orders._

Thorn had _recoiled,_ so hard the entire Guard felt it: his horror and revulsion had sent ripples, and only one squad was unaffected. Only Fox, and his personal squad, stones in the tide. From them there had been no reaction, no response; they were dead in the water for three and a half days more, before finally surfacing to their siblings’ panic and confusion. Quietly, his two seconds had taken command of his Guard. Despite everything, despite the whole Guard thrown off-kilter, they had already begun the process of what would become a brutal internal investigation.

Even then, they had already realized what some of the Guard would refuse to consider: they were compromised. Every last one of them, from Fox down to the freshest shiny.

In those precious few days, those long hours, they had searched their own memories and their siblings’ for evidence, and came up with something that would keep them from telling anyone outside the vode: they all had those moments where the blur was unnatural, where the world suddenly was pushed out of full focus. And more importantly? They had pieced together evidence - digging into the blur until it _hurt_ \- that they had been doing things without knowing. That they had been chess pieces, set up just so; when a now dead Senator called for help, the call was unanswered. When innocents were blamed, they were used as a knife to cut out the issue.

And most frighteningly, the two Commanders had accidentally triggered the state in another trooper.

Fox had seen the trooper for himself, touched their mind; where once had been a promising young shiny was nothing but sharp edges and a blank slate, nothing but those damned words over and over and over until Fox pushed away, unable to bear the sound of their thoughts against his own. Thorn had pressed the blur in the wrong place, and- This had been the result. Their individuality, suppressed to nothing.

_Good Soldiers Follow Orders._

And all the while, their little sibling practically stank of Dark, and their luckiest had spooked away from the holding cell. Fox had always considered himself lucky in a different way, never going up against the Sith and their mind-tainting machinations. He’d heard enough of it from his siblings, from Wolffe and Rex and all the rest who’d had their minds violated. But there in that cell, across from a sibling who did nothing but stare blankly ahead of them, did nothing but ask for orders when talked to… He wished he had been so lucky, that the cause had been so straightforward as a Sith in front of his blaster.

They didn’t get to figure out how to pull their sibling from this state, in the end. The shiny had followed all the orders the Commanders dared to give, but- Somewhere during Thorn’s pushing, his fumbling attempts to pull their sibling back into the light and back to themself, the shiny had suddenly freaked out. Gone for a weapon.

And shot themself.

_ The Coruscant Guard is compromised. _

Fox closed his eyes against the image, against the visage of their blood pooling against the floor, and curled his hands into fists. Someone had hurt that shiny, _his Guard._ And here he was, a distress and warning all in one passing from him and his own into the link, still unable to tell who or what had them by puppet strings. Still so kriffing _helpless._

They were _trapped_ here, with whatever Dark was pushing on them, whatever Dark had forced this upon them. Trapped with no way out; a Fox among the wolves, without even knowing where the beasts were. Just that they were watching from the shadows. Just that the Guard’s next moves would have to be made carefully, or Fox would doom them all. Maybe that accursed mantra would swallow them all in the end, down to the last man, and they would all cease to exist.

But Fox wouldn’t let it happen. Not without a fight. But how to fight an enemy that you can’t move against, that could turn you against your own with the slightest effort? Their enemy was hidden here, among those they saw regularly. Someone they thought of as harmless, perhaps even one they saw as a friend. Suddenly, the Senate Building and the Jedi Temple seemed to teem with danger, a potential mind-death at every corner; even if the Jedi were likely not complicit, to bring attention to this would be to attract attention, to bring this choking leash down on them all. And if the link was discovered, their first and truest weapon found out by the enemy-

It would be the end of them all.

With that chilling thought, Fox pushed himself away from the window, squaring his shoulders. There was work to be done in the wake of what had been decided, and he could not spend time wallowing in what was already in the past. The other Commanders had already agreed, Thorn and Thire and Stone, and the Captains and the Lieutenants in turn: desperate times called for desperate measures, and they would always put the greater whole before the few. These things were in their blood, were in what it was meant to be a clone. Their loyalty had been bred to make them a thousand painted teeth, sharp and deadly: even muzzled and apart, they were predators and pack hunters. They would succeed on their own in discovering this threat, in _ripping it to shreds,_ or fail trying.

In this nest of vipers, the Coruscant Guard would stand alone.

_ The enemy is here. The Coruscant Guard is compromised. Halt the transfers. Wall us off from the rest of the link. It’s the only way to protect you. _

_ We’re sorry, vode, vod’alor. Stay safe. _

_ We’ll see you on the other side. _

**Author's Note:**

> ...As it turns out, Fox Week actually starts on the 6th. Oops.
> 
> But either way, here we are: where things start to change. This series has also finally broken 30k words! Hooray! As celebration, I've gone back and added a couple new secrets into previous parts of the series, and plan to include more going forward...
> 
> And remember, some of them are [secrets](https://i.imgur.com/crYhjsL.png) within secrets. Sometimes, all it takes is to turn on the [light](https://i.imgur.com/iRaxsgQ.png)...


End file.
